Free association.

Freedom of the individual.

/r/Libertarian is for both philosophical and political libertarians of all kinds including, but not limited to the various "types" listed below, and is not associated with the Libertarian Party. This is a community to discuss free markets and free societies with free minds. As such, we truly believe in spontaneous order and don't formally regulate content (as encouraged by reddiquette). A few general guidelines will help everyone:

Please don't downvote comments. Especially because you disagree with a comment. No one should be shut out of a conversation because you disagree with them. In this subreddit: One is zero, zero is negative. No one should be below zero unless it's pharma spam or something.

Participate and submit content Please take some time to submit things that foster discussion on libertarian topics. This is not meant to discourage image macros, which are nothing more than glorified self posts, and are allowed in /r/libertarian. Read through those links if you want, but don't message us about it.

Report off topic pharma/revenue spam only, not trolling, or content or comments you disagree with.

Don't like the content? DON'T REPORT IT OR MESSAGE US ABOUT IT ... since we aren't going to tag it, remove it or ban anyone. Go to the new queue and vote on the submissions there if the content bothers you.

Sorry if this has been answered thoroughly before, but this question seems like one of the easiest ways to put doubt into lack of a governing body. Child labor existed until the law was enacted preventing it, no? Wasn't that a good thing?

To look at the negative aspects of child labor laws look at very poor in 3rd world countries after 1st world nations force them to prevent kids from working. They can barely get enough money to eat, and then the law makes the kids not work so now they starve and often the kids get forced into prostitution for money to eat.

Also, there was a 12 year old kid near where I live a few years back that WANTED to work at his uncle's business and made the mistake of saying that he was paid for the work and the government came down on him and forced him not to work. How is that in the best interests in that kid?

So your answer to crushing poverty and child starvation in third world nations is "Your situation is the free market telling you your children need to work, those lazy bums!"

This isn't the 1800s anymore. Life doesn't have to be that difficult. We have both plentiful knowledge and resources to help them produce more with less work and lift themselves out of poverty. Our declination to do so is immoral. What's the point of life, if only to propagate our species and pat ourselves on the back at how free our markets are?

The path out of poverty is to work. Those children DO need to work or they will starve or forced into prostitution. They aren't forced into working by someone else, they're forced into working out of necessity.

You're throwing your Western values on different cultures who don't have the same values as your own. By the time child labor laws came about in the west there was much less need for child labor. The factories were becoming more automatized as were the mines ending the need for children to work in those fields.

If you increase the supply of labor, don't you decrease the value of labor, and then you're right back in the same situation? That's pretty much a core market tenet, supply and demand, that is. If the market demanded more work than was supplied, wouldn't it value the work appropriately, and then everyone would be able to eat?

Not to mention, given the option of "You aren't growing enough food, make your kids work", "Here's some free food, hopefully you'll figure it out soon" or "Here, borrow my tractor for a while, it'll help you grow more food with the same effort" I'd go for letting them borrow our tractor. We've got plenty of food already, so we can handle a minor cut in production. We're not simply giving them food, we're giving them the ability to grow their own food. (Imperfect analogy, you get the idea...)

The libertarian movement argues so much about "theft" and "taxation" but so little is said for simply helping each other because it's the right thing to do, dammit. I freely give my money - the sweat of my brow, as it were - to social good like parks, welfare, healthcare, and foreign aid. If you don't want to, well... that's why I don't generally define myself as libertarian.

If you increase the supply of labor, don't you decrease the value of labor

Not if there is enough demand for the labor. There is a reason why low skilled jobs pay very little. The supply is always plentiful and the demand is always high. By working low skilled jobs workers can obtain more skills that are worth more.

I freely give my money - the sweat of my brow, as it were - to social good like parks, welfare, healthcare, and foreign aid.

That's the government forcing you to give up your money. Giving up your money freely and the government taking it are two competently different things.

I'll concede the point re: taxation since I doubt we'd affect each other's minds, but supply and demand is a pretty well understood phenomenon of the market.

Increasing supply of labor by letting children work won't directly affect demand of labor. Price = Demand / Supply (roughly). No matter how high the demand for labor, if supply goes up, price will go down. It has nothing to do with skills.

Low skilled jobs with low supply (generally due to undesirability) pay pretty well - often as well as highly skilled desirable jobs - because there is no supply. Take Garbage Collection, for instance... average salary (according to minimal research, so take with a grain of salt) is $43k, and takes no skill beyond "pick up can, dump in truck," but that salary is just shy of my starting salary as a software engineer.

So, why does garbage collection pay so much more than a fry cook at McDonalds, which is arguably a higher skilled job? Because we've got scores of teenagers, etc lining up to work in fast food, but most people consider themselves "above" garbage collection. If suddenly everyone decided working fast food was undesirable as garbage collection and there were nobody left to replace them, I'd imagine fast food wages would go up as well.

It does. If a person is more skilled then they're more valuable. It takes time, experience, effort and in lots of cases, money, to become skilled. That's why a doctor is paid more than a garbage truck driver.

There will always be more unskilled labor than skilled labor for that reason.

What child would choose to work? 15 or 16, sure, I can believe that. That's why most labor laws allow people to work most non-dangerous jobs at 15-16 depending on state. But 12? 10? Younger? At what point can we be sure the child isn't just doing whatever their parents tell them to do and saying it was their choice?

Fine. But I don't think you're going to get very far promoting an ideology that considers a third world, starving-children-working-in-factories world view reasonable.

My argument, explained like I'm five: "If they don't have enough food, give them some tractors or something so they can eat and their kids can go to school and play and then help us do art and science and cool stuff like that."

I think that people tend to assume that a child who works, is a child that's being abused. But that's not the case. I see kids who are perfectly fine working behind the counter at their family owned business. And if it's ever a situation where the kid is making money to support themselves/their family, why would you want to take that opportunity away from them and force them into a situation where they're selling their bodies, smuggling drugs, or doing anything else of that nature? It's not like telling them that can't work is going to suddenly put food in their stomachs.

That's sort of why welfare exists. Keep the kid in school by providing basic levels of economic security. An education will likely do that kid better than working for $2/hr due to their lack of skill (assuming we got rid of minimum wage laws, which is a popular belief here)

Which is why I didn't say pennies. But what company is going to pay a 12 year old with no experience more than, say, $2/hr? They're extremely limited in ability and judgement and high liability risks. People take unpaid internships now, which is a reality and not some "Fallacy put forward by anti-capitalist pro-government handout" boogeyman. It is logical to think that a company would also put a 12 year old on an "unpaid internship" so they can build skills.

There was some sort of law about being 16 to work in a grocery store, so I circumvented that by working on my own. If there was a really strong law that I couldn't work around, I would have just watched TV and I would have thought "we have a kind and caring government, that wants me to watch TV instead of sweating weeding gardens". And I would have been worse off for the kindness.

Your results may not be indicative of anyone else's. Apparently people become fully functioning adults even with current child labor laws. Plus the laws taught you to work for yourself rather than work for someone else at a grocery store.

because children are not property, parents should not be allowed to "sell" children, nor should they be allowed to "enslave" children, but if a child wants to work for their own benefit then what right do you have to refuse to allow them that opportunity,

Child labor was decreasing before government enacted a law to ban it. Just like injuries in the work force were declining before government enacted OSHA, or how poverty was decreasing before government declared the war on poverty, or how crime was decreasing before government got "tough on crime."

The free market has continuously working to increase the standard of living while reducing the cost of living. Government just jumps on board, passes a law, and in some cases such as child labor or work place fatalities takes credit for it (despite their efforts- poverty hasn't decreased since government got involved, and crime has actually increase since government got involved).

There is a bigger problem though than banning child labor in developed countries, when you ban child labor in developing countries, these children end up starving or end up in child prostitution. Its better to leave these markets to their own and develop out from the need of child labor than to try to legislate it away and then have to deal with the consequences.